


Window of Opportunity

by Thyra279



Category: Good Omens (TV), Good Omens - Neil Gaiman & Terry Pratchett
Genre: Aziraphale Loves Crowley (Good Omens), Comedy, Confused Aziraphale (Good Omens), Crowley Loves Aziraphale (Good Omens), Disaster Crowley (Good Omens), M/M, fluff-ish
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-06-14
Updated: 2020-06-14
Packaged: 2021-03-04 00:34:27
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,932
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24724618
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Thyra279/pseuds/Thyra279
Summary: Shit, shit, shit, shit, shi-The old beige door slams into the beige wall beside it, then slams back on to a startled-looking beige-ish angel and back, a little weaker this time, into the wall again. The angel looks from the unusually violent door into the room, where he very quickly locates the source of the commotion that had him commit the indignity of running up the stairs from the bookshop."Crowley! What on earth are you doing?"It's a good question. No easy answer, unfortunately.
Relationships: Aziraphale/Crowley (Good Omens)
Comments: 15
Kudos: 31
Collections: Verb Roulette





	Window of Opportunity

_Shit, shit, shit, shit, shi-_

The old beige door slams into the beige wall beside it, then slams back on to a startled-looking beige-ish angel and back, a little weaker this time, into the wall again. The angel looks from the unusually violent door into the room, where he very quickly locates the source of the commotion that had him commit the indignity of running up the stairs from the bookshop.

"Crowley! What on _earth_ are you doing?"

It's a good question. No easy answer, unfortunately.

Crowley stirs a little, shuffles in a bid to get comfortable on the tiny perch he's sat on, and in doing so becomes horrendously aware of a sting in his right buttock and the fact that his arse might be bleeding.

The demon Crowley, who mostly goes by Anthony J. Crowley these days, has suffered the unmitigated humiliation of being thrown, cascaded and otherwise chucked out of windows a total of fourteen times since those overglorified holes were invented. More than most, sure, but really, in the grand scheme of things, not bad for a demon who's spent the entirety of the lifespan of windows on Earth.

Not that that matters much in the present situation.

"Oh, hello Aziraphale." Breezy. Breezy's good. Breezy is… Before the demon can finish the thought, a draft sends a tartan curtain flying at his face. A little splutter and a snap of his long fingers, and the curtain hangs limp, lifeless once again. Right. Good. Back to breezy. "Lovely afternoon, isn't it? Have you seen that cloud over there, looks a little like a… like a… don't you think?"

There's a distinct narrowing of the principality's (two humanoid) eyes, unmissable even from the other side of the room.

"Crowley… are you breaking in?" And to be fair to the angel, it's a decent assumption to make, Crowley can't really blame him. Quite hard to get around the fact that Crowley is currently frozen, straddling a windowsill full of glass he has broken through moments before, one lanky leg dangling idly against the brick wall on the other side of the window of Aziraphale's bedroom.

"…No."

Two angelic eyes narrow further. Luckily, the demon Crowley never gets flustered. At this moment, though, he does _happen_ to draw back a little, cringe away from that righteous gaze, and lose the ability to think, speak or come up with any sort of decent excu- explanation.

What he _does_ manage, to his eternal regret, is to muster up the following:

"Look, this- this is not what it looks like."

Aziraphale's eyes are barely more than slivers at this point, darting from the broken shards of glass on his frayed old off-beige carpet to the sunglasses pushed up high on Crowley's forehead, revealing his maybe slightly panicked eyes. It all leaves Crowley feeling rather exposed.

"Well, Crowley. Please do enlighten me if you feel so inclined, because from where I'm standing, it looks an awful lot like you are taking advantage of my being out to break into my home without my knowledge when you know perfectly well that you are always welcome to swing by as long as you have the common decency to swing by _through the front door_."

The angel's standing less than 12 feet away. It looks pretty much the same from where Crowley is, truth be told.

"I'm not! I'm… I erh, I'm…"

"Yes?"

Demonic humanoid corporations technically do not need to sweat, in the same way that they do not need to breathe or eat or sleep or flutter with butterflies and hormones every time they see their hereditary enemy, even when said hereditary enemy is all tight-lipped and frowny and frankly looks like he might actually smite him. And yet, Crowley feels little beads sashaying their way down his forehead like rain on the window that…

Crowley chances a glance down to the street below to where Aziraphale's ugly bedside-table lies scattered across the pavement in a sea of glass and pine. One floor, he can easily make that without too many broken bones. Then just a quick sprint to the Bentley and he'll be off. Might need a few demonic manipulations to stop the queue outside the coffee shop from noticing. And then a great big demonic intervention and a bucket or two of vodka to stop himself from mulling over the decision to self-defenestrate right in front of the angel. And then a few centuries or possibly millennia of avoiding A-

Well that won't do, will it.

" I wasn't breaking in."

The angel cocks a singular eyebrow.

"I was… I was…"

" _Crowley_."

"… _Fine_. I was breaking out."

The singular angelic eyebrow is ascends to the same incredulous heights as its partner. They join the eyes below in staring at Crowley, like little accusatory worms, or snakes or – hey, that's an idea.

Crowley closes his eyes for a second, and there it is, that little niggle, that little spark of the occult he _just_ needs to grab on to in a slightly different dimension. _There_. He feels it coming, the fall in body temperature, the stretching of his spine, the smoothing of his skin into something-

" _Crowley_. Don't you _dare_ transform while I am talking to you." Aziraphale takes a step forward, then immediately stops when Crowley, mid-snakenisation, leans another few degrees out of the window. "Now, please dear, do convert back to fully human, we cannot have the good people of Soho glancing up and seeing you like this; it'll take _days_ to sort out." Crowley does, because how could he not, and Aziraphale softens a little. "Thank you, dear. Now, why don't we head downstairs and have a nice cup of tea and you can explain to me what exactly it is you're doing."

Crowley, fully human once more, makes use of that fact to cross his arms not-at-all like a petulant child. "Nah, I'm fine right here, thanks."

The principality mutters something that sounds very much like "stubborn wily bastard" and takes another few steps towards the object of his detestations despite said object's feeble hisses of protest. There's a distinctive crunch to each of the last few steps which they both choose to ignore. They've got quite good at ignoring stuff, having made it all the way through to 1995 AD with a whole cruise-liner's worth of stuff that they do not bring up between them. Things better left unsaid, really.

Crowley considers using a demonic miracle to slip the sunglasses back on properly, but on balance, that might be more of a giveaway than keeping them where they are.

"Now, my dear demon, tell me what exactly you were doing."

"Pnnhhgg."

Aziraphale bends down beside him, smoothing out the folds in his trousers as he does. Looks at him just a little too closely. It is infuriatingly patronising. Crowley considers diving backwards out the window, consequences be damned.

"Go on, then."

"I wassss… I did come in through the front door. Like a, erh, like a normal entity."

"Oh? Well, that's very considerate of you. And then…?"

"And then… I couldn't really see you anywhere."

"Well, as I said, I was out – I got an invitation to that gallery opening, remember? I asked if you wanted to come along?"

"Yeah, uh, about that…"

"Turns out, though, that there _was_ no gallery opening at all, would you believe-"

"-You know, actually I would. I'm trying to tell you that-"

"-I even went on the _underground_ , Crowley, would you believe, on the _Piccadilly Line_ at rush hour and halfway across London, and then it turns out that the blasted gallery doesn't even exi-"

Okay, fine, here come the sunglasses. It seems to shut the angel up. Rather useful information, really. Store that away for another day.

A significantly darker version of Aziraphale gets back up slowly, with a great big crack of one knee.[1] Unfortunately, the Aziraphale staring back down at him again has gone back to glaring.

"Crowley… didn't you tell me that you were going to be otherwise engaged today?"

"What?"

"Yes… you did. When I asked if you might want to come along."

"Nah-"

"I believe 'extraordinarily busy' was the exact term you used…"

"Pfft."

Aziraphale looks like he's got half a mind to push Crowley out of the window himself, but he restrains himself to a pout and a few annoyed blinks in his direction. "Yes, well, be that as it may, Crowley, I really must insist on an explanation."

"Right. Yeah, I guess that's fair."

Aziraphale does not look away even as he backs towards his bed and plonks himself down to sit on it. Which really doesn't help Crowley's already compromised state at all.

"I… I came through your door and didn't see you anywhere, so I thought I'd wait, you know…" The angel nods, pouty lips subsiding ever so slightly, like one of those horrible toothy moraine creatures retreating back into its cave.[2]

"That's all very well, Crowley, but how exactly did you end up up here? I don't believe I've ever invited you upstairs." _He most definitely has not_ , a little demonic voice supplies, unhelpfully.

"Nah, I, ah…"

"I'm sure you understand how I might consider you encroaching on my personal space something of an invasion of privacy."

"Well. N. Nnnnnnyeah."

"And speaking of invitations, Crowley. Did you send me on a wild goose chase halfway across London?"

"I, erh. It's possible that that is something I might have… accidentally…"

"I don't believe it was accidental."

"No-no… yeah."

Aziraphale sighs and looks away from Crowley's sunglasses and down his body, squashed into the frame of the window like a banana in a too-small lunch box. Crowley, under the intent gaze of his ethereal adversary, tries to make up for the less than flattering position by throwing his inside foot onto the windowsill, a casual display of nonchalance.

Where most creatures might respond to danger or threatening situations with a fight-flight-or-freeze reaction, the demon Crowley responds, innately, by throwing his lanky corporation into the coolest-looking consternation possible. Ergo, his scaly foot popping up on the windowsill.

For a moment, everything is tick- fine. The next moment, Crowley realises that one should not be able to perch, arms crossed, one foot up and the other dangled outside the window, on a thin little windowsill, and so, blasted excuse for a demon that he is, he overbalances and topples, though as coolly as possible, out of the window.

[1] Cracks shouldn't really happen to angelic kneecaps, of course, but Aziraphale once heard on the radio that middle-aged humans often have terrible problems with their knees, and so, inexplicably in Crowley's opinion, decided that that was something his corporation ought to partake in.

[2] Now, one might think that the Serpent of Eden might feel some kind of solidarity with eels, moraines and other similarly slippery, length-optimised creatures. In fact, the opposite is the case, said creatures reaching something very akin to the uncanny valley for snakes in the same way that a Homo Sapiens human might feel about other evolutionary versions of the Homo variety, were they to have ever existed. Crowley is not, in fact, entirely certain whether they did or not. The whole business of evolution is one which he and Aziraphale don't like to stray too close to on less than at least eight bottles of good Malbec each. In fact, they don't really like to look too closely at the whole area of biology for that same reason and so haven't in a good 150 years, one late-night documentary on highland gorillas excepted.


End file.
